We build awesome software for East Africa.

Today I was chatting with a colleague on Skype, and as is often the case, misspelled something in my rush to get something across.

A habit I picked up in the IRC days, days I realize have not ended for some, is to use the Perl syntax for doing a regex substitution to indicate a correction. For example, if you wrote "hello wrld", I would indicate my correction using "s/wrld/world/". Crazily enough, this now works in Skype. It just edits your previous post inline!

Some experimentation shows that it isn't a full regular expression engine, it will only do straight word substitution. It also assumes the 'g' or 'global' flag, so all words that match your string will be replaced, not just the first.

But it is super cool stuff, a brief demonstration:

Noticed how I mispelled word as wrd. No worries, I can edit that post with the regex:

Hats off to Skype on this one, neat stuff.

Update: I forgot that there's also another IRC'ism that Skype supports. /me. You can type "/me is bored" and Skype will turn this into "Nic Pottier is bored" in a specially formatted block. Anybody know any others?